Thread by @HillelNeuer

Nightmare dystopian universe of George Orwell’s 1984—totalitarian surveillance and thought police of Big Brother—has come alive today in the Chinese regime.

It reaches beyond as Beijing deploys propagandists like @jameschau, @WHO “goodwill ambassador.”

nytimes.com/2020/12/19/tec…

Early in the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese authorities clamped down on information to make the virus look less severe, and the government more capable, thousands of secret government directives and other documents reviewed by the New York Times reveal.

The curbs started in early January, before the novel coronavirus had even been identified definitively. When news spread that Li Wenliang a doctor who had warned about the new viral outbreak, had died of Covid-19, China’s censors doubled down.

NYT: “They ordered news sites not to issue push alerts about his death, and told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages and activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter.”nyti.ms/3arJeFO

“Pay particular attention to posts with pictures of candles, people wearing masks, an entirely black image or other efforts to escalate or hype the incident,” read one directive. Online memorials began to disappear.

China’s censors issued special instructions to manage anger over Dr. Li’s death.

‘Warning of the “unprecedented challenge” Dr. Li’s passing had posed & “butterfly effect” it may have set off, officials got to work suppressing the inconvenient news & reclaiming the narrative, according to secret directives sent to local propaganda workers & news outlets.’

Officials of the Chinese regime ordered the news media to downplay the crisis.

County officials boasted of their censorship.

Propaganda workers on round-the-clock shifts wrote up reports describing how they were ensuring people saw nothing that contradicted the soothing message from the Communist Party: that it had the virus firmly under control.